How did we make plastic that isn’t biodegradable and is so bad for the planet, out of materials only found on Earth?

Question

I just wondered how we made these sorts of things when everything on Earth works together and naturally decomposes.

In: 6571

Answer 1

I think the obvious thing most answers are missing is that lots of things on earth are not biodegradable. That’s why there’s an earth.

The problem isn’t just that the things don’t degrade, but the effects they have *while* they don’t go away. Because plastics don’t have the same properties as a lot of other things in our environment, there’s little evolutionary response to it. So animals and plants that encounter plastics can have detrimental effects to their health just based on being some foreign substance that life can’t figure out how to handle.